China pushes next generation Internet technology

China has claimed a great leap forward in development of future internet technologies. They have been working to promote adoption and use of CERNET2, which currently connects 25 universities in 20 cities throughout China, with the backbone network flying along at between 2.5 to 10 Gigabits/per sec. It is claimed that experiments have been conducted that have managed to achieve speeds of 40 Gigabits/per sec, using Internet Protocol Version 6.

On March 19, 2004, China's first trunk network of the next-generation network, CERNET2, went online. More than 6,000 kilometers of optical fiber cable connect dozens of universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

The use of a large proportion of domestically developed features in the next-generation net will make the CERNET2 test network a key component of infrastructure in promoting the development of next-generation network in China.